Van’s group was alarmed by his reversion, and members raced to try to get him back on track, pointing out to him that (1) he was claiming to have made great changes, but his entitled insistence that Gail owed him loyalty was evidence of an abuser who wasn’t changing; (2) he was slipping back into minimizing how destructive his abusiveness and violence had been to Gail, to an extreme where he was convincing himself that he was a more constructive presence in her life than other people were; and (3) he was failing to accept the reality that a woman does not have to be “all good” in order to have the right to live free of abuse. I kept an additional thought to myself, which was that based on my conversation with her I was confident that Gail’s life was not “going nowhere” and that her primary goal at that point was to heal from what he had done to her. When he made disparaging references to “her issues,” he was ignoring the reality that her issues were 90 percent him. I remained silent on this point because I was concerned, given the state of mind he was in, that the better he understood her healing process, the more effectively he would take steps to sabotage it.